By 1963, Gussie Busch had owned the Cardinals for a full decade, with no hint of a pennant in sight. He sought opinions from the members of his legion of cronies as to what he should do to improve the team. One drinking buddy, Robert Cobb, the owner of the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood and the Hollywood Stars baseball team, had been a close friend of Branch Rickey's. At one time, the Stars had been a minor league farm club of Rickey's Brooklyn Dodgers. Cobb suggested that Mr. Busch hire Rickey as his general manager. Rickey was a name, and no one had been more successful. His last general manager's job, running the Pittsburgh Pirates, had come to an end. Cobb told Mr. Busch, "The best brain in baseball is sitting in Pittsburgh doing nothing."

Busch didn't fire [Bing] Devine. Instead, in 1963 he hired a legend of a man to watch over him. At the age of eighty-one, Branch Rickey was hired to be a "senior consultant" to the team he had first helped run back in 1917. Mr. Busch was expecting a miracle worker who could finally bring his team a pennant .... [T]he hiring of Rickey put Devine on notice that unless the Cards won, and soon, his days of running the team were numbered.

BING DEVINE: "....One day Mr. Rickey called me down to his office, and he said, 'I need a ride home today .... Can you drive me home?' So I said yes, and when we got in the car, we started talking, and he said some things that led me to say, 'Mr. Rickey, why don't you tell me the truth of why you feel you're here?' He said, 'Well, Mr. Busch brought me in, has some confidence in me, wants me to run the club where we can succeed and win the pennant and the World Series. I'm really here to run the club.' He asked me, 'Are you and I going to have trouble?' I said, "Mr. Rickey, you and I already have trouble.'"

When Devine determined that Julio Gotay was not an everyday shortstop, during the winter of '62, he told Rickey that he wanted to trade the youngster along with pitcher Don Cardwell to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Diomenes Olivo and Dick Groat, the sure-handed, seasoned veteran. Rickey, to Devine's dismay, was against making the trade.

BING DEVINE: ".... He told me, 'I'm not going to approve the Groat deal. The reason I'm not is, I don't believe in dealing young ballplayers for older ballplayers ....' I set up a meeting during a game in St. Petersburgh at the old Al Lang Field. I had gathered a circle of my baseball people, and we brought up the Groat deal, and Mr. Rickey said, 'I don't like the deal, I'm not going to approve it.' And he looked around at me and the baseball people, and he said, 'You've loaded this meeting, haven't you?' And I said, 'I've loaded it with people working for me. They are baseball people, and they all agree we should make the deal ....'

"Well, we made the deal. You can pick out two or three key players we acquired, but I don't think we would have won that pennant [in 1964] without a player like Dick Groat."

Groat solidified what was fast becoming the finest infield in the league. In the All-Star Game in 1963, the entire starting infield consisted of St. Louis Cardinals: Bill White, Julian Javier, Dick Groat, and Ken Boyer. It was the first time this happened in the history of the All-Star Game.

[1963] also marked the emergence of a young catcher by the name of Tim McCarver. Loquacious and arrogant, he was a contradiction in so many ways. Though a Southerner from Memphis, his baseball heroes were black men: Hank Aaron and Monte Irvin .... He had been a great high school football player, but he wanted to play a sport professionally without having to go to college first, and so he went into baseball.

Sixteen teams had wanted to sign him. After he was scouted by Yankee Hall of Famer Bill Dickey, New York offered him a $50,000 signing bonus. The Giants upped it to $58,000. The Yankees went to $60,000, and then St. Louis bid $75,000.

He got his first taste of the big leagues at the age of nineteen. When a St. Louis newspaperman compared him to the Gashouse Gang catcher Bill DeLancey, he wasn't flattered .... McCarver rebelled at having to live with the pressure of being compared to a Cardinal legend who had died young. He wanted to be appreciated for himself.

....When McCarver became the Cardinals' regular catcher in 1963 at the age of twenty-two, the comparisons didn't stop, but before McCarver's twenty-one year career was over, he would surpass DeLancey and take his place as the standard against which all future Cardinal backstops would be measured.

....Yet despite the improvement in the Cardinals in 1963, they could not derail Koufax, Drysdale, and the L.A. Dodgers. The Cards made a late run for the pennant, winning nineteen of twenty games to close the gap to one game in mid-September, but when Bob Gibson broke his leg while taking batting practice with two weeks to go in the season, the task became too difficult without him.

The Cards won 93 games and finished second, six games out. The late run saved Devine's job. While Gibson won 18, Sandy Koufax had one of the greatest seasons in National League history. He finished the year 25-5, including 5 big wins over St. Louis. His ERA was 1.88. Koufax's year was the difference.

--Peter Golenbock

The Spirit of St. Louis

Boyer Keeps Cards in Pennant Race

Ken Boyer's bat and steady glove at third base was a significant reason the Cardinals were able to stay in the National League pennant race until the final week of the 1963 season, Stan Musial's last. Boyer hit .285 that season with 24 home runs and 111 RBI. The following year, the Cards won their first flag without Musial since 1934. Again, Boyer would be the big bat. His 119 RBI would lead the league in 1964 and would earn him the National League Most Valuable Player Award.

-- The Baseball Chronicle

"Because the Cardinals needed a shortstop, I had the good fortune to play for the finest organization in all professional sports. The Cardinals treated players better, they treated your kids and family better, they paid you better, they made travel better. The Cardinals were a fairly close team when I got there and became very close. Guys like Bill White, Ken Boyer, Curt Flood, Tim McCarver, Bob Gibson, and I were tremendous competitors. White, Flood and I hit over .300; Boyer and White each hit around 25 homers and drove in over 100 runs; White, Javier, Boyer, Flood, and McCarver were superb defensively. Bob Gibson and Ernest Broglio each won 18 games and Curt Simmons won 15. And we had Stan Musial. This was a solid team.

"....[I]n 1963 I had the best year of my career .... I hit the ball with more authority. I was leading the league in batting average when Don Drysdale hit me on the thumb in Dodger Stadium. I couldn't hold the bat, but the ballclub was going pretty good and I kept on playing. I went 0 for 28. Still I finished at .319, tying Henry Aaron for third in the batting race behind Tommy Davis and Bobby Clemente. I led the league with 43 doubles, drove in a career-high 73 runs, and had a career-high 201 hits. I was the biggest vote getter in either league for the All-Star Game, and I finished second to Sandy Koufax in the MVP voting.

".... [Ken] Boyer was the captain of the Cardinals and everyone looked up to him on the field and off. He looked after his teammates .... Bill White could do it all. He was a marvelous left-handed batter who hit for power and average and was the best-fielding first baseman in the league .... Curt Flood was a super guy with the greatest sense of humor. I loved being around him .... Curt could flat out play center field and could really handle a bat. He changed his style and became a truly great hitter .... Bob Gibson was a great pitcher, on the same level as Sandy Koufax. In terms of longevity, Warren Spahn was the greatest pitcher of my era, but the best pitchers I saw were Gibson and Koufax, who were a bit ahead of Juan Marichal, Jim Maloney, and Don Drysdale. Bob was a great athlete who had played basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters. Not only could he pitch, but he was a terrific hitter and fast runner."

--Dick Groat

We Played the Game

"We were drifting along, having a good year but seemingly out of contention, when suddenly in September we won 19 of 20 games. That put us only 1 game behind the Dodgers. They were playing good, too, having won 13 of 18. The Dodgers came in for a 3-game series and I was welcomed to big-time pressure. We had to face Johnny Podres, who had the best circle change I ever saw, Sandy Koufax, and hard-throwing Peter Richert, three left-handers. They beat us 3-1, and then 4-0 on a Koufax 4-hitter. We scored 5 runs in 2 innings off Richert in the third game, but their relief pitching didn't let us score any more runs. Ron Perranoski relieved for them beginning in the eighth inning. We still led 5-4 with 1 out and nobody on in the top of the 9th when Dick Nen, who had just stepped off the plane from Spokane, hit an unlikely homer against Ron Taylor to tie the game. It was his only hit in 8 at-bats for the Dodgers that year (and he wouldn't play in the majors again until 1965 when he surfaced with Washington). In the bottom of the eleventh, Dick Groat led off against Perranoski with a triple. But he died at third. Then we lost in the thirteenth inning. If we'd won that game, we would have been only 2 back and still in the race. That loss blew us out. But the expectations for our team rose.

"This was Stan Musial's 22nd and final season. On September 29 the Cards held a Stan Musial Day and he got his 2 final hits, bringing his total to 3,630, then the National League record. Remarkably, that gave him 1,815 hits at home and 1,815 hits on the road .... In late September, Stan had his number 6 retired. His playing career was over and he became a Cardinals vice president. Stan was a walking icon and was so revered that we would feel he was part of the team in 1964 when we finally won the pennant. We would think that it was his lucky aura that helped us prevail."